I'm experiencing the same lock-up issue
My profile contains my PC specs, but I am indeed having this same issue. It's driving me nuts. At random times, for no reason whatsoever, the game will freeze-up my entire PC. My laptop will ping my pc and get no response, etc etc so my system is completely and totally dead.
I run Windows XP Home Edition and have been for a very long time now.
I have played many other games on this PC with very few or no problems.
Anyways here's the details.
When watching DivX anime episodes I experience random lock-ups which cause my entire pc to freeze up and requires a cold reboot to fix.
The same thing happens at random times in Soldier of Fortune II. I was playing in 1280x1024 resolution at first, full settings. I have since then dropped the settings lower, and it still does it. The incidents of freezing occur much less often in my anime watching than it does in this game (in this game it happens anywhere from 5 minutes into it to 20 minutes into it, tops)
One time i put the game into windowed mode, disabled all other applications running, and put up the TAsk Manager off to the side. I monitored my CPU usage and PF/Memory usage.
I noticed my CPU usage never went beyond 55% and my PF usage was no more than 340 even in intense situations. My memory was nowhere near full, nor was my CPU usage. My system froze, including the task manager. everything froze. it was frozen at 54% CPU usage and 339MB PF.. which was only about 3 out of the 8 bars representing memory in task manager.
I realize it's not because my system is being overloaded, because otherwise the cpu usage and memory usage bars woulda been full right?
Anyways, I've played many other games including UT2003, SoF1, Final Fantasy XI since December, Need for Speed Underground, etc etc... never got a single lockup with any of those games (except for FFXI when targeting mining points). Whenever I did get freezes in these games, I was able to alt-tab out and close the program without needing to reboot. SoF2 and DivX animes are a different story, my entire system is compromised (Which is BS since XP runs programs in speerate processes and isn't supposed to lose the entire system to an application crash!)
I'm running the latest ATI Catalyst drivers for my operating system and video card.
Anyone have any suggestions please? This is driving me nuts.